From Treasure Island it was a two and a half hour drive to Merced and only four hours to Yosemite. I visited both several times in the eight months I had on TI.

Credit: mouse from merced

I was in the Navy's Electronics School at TI, had guard duty every few nights, on the SF side, watching the Bay Bridge suffered no secret sampan attacks ALONE IN THE DARK and stoned on weed.

I went to the Mission District to score, not the Haight (too crowded); there was a commune that I "freak-wented."

Actually, this was NOT during the Summer of Love, but in the Autumn and the Winter of Love and the Spring Following said Summer of Love. I was in Boot Camp all summer, but came out with a bang by attending the Monterey Jazz Festival on the Sunday that Janis was there. It wasn't Monterey Pops, but just as cool.

Got my first joints from a fellow sailor who happened to be my Merced neighbor Larry who was stationed at DLI Monterey, this on a weekend we both happened to be in Merced and following basic at San Diego and before the jazz festival, which I attended with Larry. Once stationed at TI, I stayed high as much as possible.

I managed to see several good hallucinations on TI while tripping, also. Frank Zappa appeared one night, all of two feet tall. If you don't believe me, what can I tell you? The commercial potential of my convincing you of what I say is non-existent, while Frank lives on, Walter.

67? I think the Air Force had just come to the realization that I was maybe not potential High Command material, and I to the realization that maybe I would be happier guiding whitewater than bombing people I didn't know.

So we parted ways, and I picked up my paddle again and the Air Force did whatever it did.

I was ten years old and on the 4th of July I broke my big, middle knuckle whilst trying to give my buddy a hard fist to his back when he ducked and I hit his hard head instead. With a cast on for the rest of the summer, I couldn't swim, so I was relegated to the dry, hot banks of Fancher Creek on the outskirts of SE Fresno where all the teenagers and such were hanging out, swimming, smoking, and turning on. The AM radio was all anyone had in those days, and the anthem of the summer for the Fresno scene was definitely Golden Road, whose lyrics describe things as good as any.

I was 15. A local church ran a "youth club" in the basement of their church and staffed it with students from the local college. So naturally, that being the 60s, a couple of my girlfriends started dating two of the college guys. Through whom we met some other college guys, one of whom became my boyfriend. They all had tenament apts, and we used to hang out and engage in various illicit activities under the glow of the blacklight posters.

My boyfriend was very sweet and never tried to "take advantage of me". He fell in love with me and insisted he wanted to come to my house to meet my Mom. There was a house rule that I couldn't date anyone over 18, so I told my Mom he was 18, which made her smile. My Mom was a wise women. When I broke up with him after a month, she even felt sorry for him because he was such a sweetheart.

Nights were spent listening to rock and roll albums - vinyl of course and getting stoned. Odd stoner games were invented. One of our favorites we called "cookie". Some one had tied a cookie in a baggie with a long string to the pull chain of a light fixture. We would sit around in a big circle and bat it around from person to person. It's amazing the things that can seem interesting when you're stoned.

In our town, this was just before the police fully understood the drug scene. We used to gather in a couple of public places in a group and pass joints around and were never even approached by the cops. They didn't yet know the smell of it. It was in one of these circles gatherings that I met my next boyfriend of that summer, I gorgeous black college student with a huge afro. This was still an explosive time for "interracial dating", a concept the current generation would find it hard to believe. Van and I were walking in our small town downtown holding hands one day when my Aunt saw me. She was horrified and told my dad who through me into a wall and beat me with a belt when I got home. But that wasn't the thing that caused me to break up with him. It was the three black chicks who cornered me in the bathroom of the youth club and put a knife to my belly and told me that I shouldn't be seeing a brother and that if it didn't stop I was going to regret it. I was just a love and peace hippie chick back then, so I was quite scared. But he was about to go back to college anyway so the time to say goodbye was right.

We were all so young and naive and didn't understand the danger of drugs. Later that winter, the police had caught up to the drug scene and they conducted a big nighttime "raid", in which a bunch of our college friends were arrested. It was front page news that day, with the list of different drugs that were siezed - pot, crystal, coke, acid, mescaline...

I was so frightened and upset (a couple of the guys ended up going to prison). My Mom was so loving and she said to me "Phyl, I can understand that it would be interesting to try these things to have these experiences, but if the drugs are illegal, how do you know they're not poisonous or that you're not going to have some really bad reaction?" And you know, I was so naive and trusting at that age that that had never even occurred to me.

So that's a small taste of it... Parts of it were great - being with a group of people where you felt like you belong, other people who were freaks like you were. And parts of it were not so great, like our friend who loved acid so much and took such massive doses that year, that he basically turned himself into a walking vegetable after a while - got to the point he needed to be cared for by his parents like a baby.

That was the summer of my first trip to Yosemite, pictued below...me on the far right with my siblings.

Credit: Cragman

Climbers were scarce in the Valley back then, but I remember seeing a few over at Swan Slab, and watched them for hours as they banged pins and bantered away.

Interestingly, what I recall the most of them was their clothing, as my parents made SUCH a big deal out of it....they called it "beatnik" clothes. Bell bottoms, bright colors, paisley shirts, bandanas.....we kids just called them hippies.

I was too young for the "love" that was going on.....but I fell in love with the Valley that summer....an affair that continues to this day.

Cargman, you don't mind my pointing out you look ready to spring into, you know "the pose..."

And thanks, Phyl, for very real life.

Raise your hand if one of your psychedelic trips was a "bummer."

If your classmates have died of H overdosing.

If you ever found yourself wearing corduroy bell-bottoms. Jerry Coe gave me a pair his gal, Renee, had sewn for him, "just like Bridwell's," because he realilzed they looked, oh, "stupid," I suppose. This cord cloth was not quite cord, but thick and nappy, a real Flashin' Statement. I lived in Berkeley by then, or I may/would have felt stupid wearing them myself anyplace but in Berkeley!

If you ever drank Romilar or similar OTC drugs. When we got busted here for the first time, we had several empties of cough syrup lying around and a very few empty beer cans in the old abandoned garage with the mattresses and no lights (our hang on Olive, out past all the houses, and we called it the 17 Acres). It was one of our Merced police force's first efforts at curtailing imminent widespread youth drug abuse, too, apparently. One detective wanted to know who was our "guide." This was on my semester break, home from ST. Mary's, in February, 1967. Of course I was a college drop-out. I was cool and so were my friends back then.

"I don't remember any guide, Detective; I didn't even read the instructions on the bottles," is not good interrogation manners.

I was living in Boulder. Just out of DU and climbing daily. We had a house on the hill, on 10th st, and the odor of weed and patchouli was omnipresent. Boulder was a crossroads for hipsters going east and west. I knew some who survived by driving over the Kansas border to pick wild weed in the roadside ditches then selling it in Boulder. Our house was filled with folks coming and going. It was one big party. It was hot so we climbed in Estes most of the time. In August we, Chris Landry, climbed the Diamond. Our first wall. Aid, pitons, belay seats the whole deal. We actually practiced for a bivy on Lumpy Ridge. We did not know WTF we were doing. We went up about one pitch and spent the night in slings just to get our sh#t in a pile. We did bivy one night on the route on the Diamond. At summer's end the fun was over. I was out of academic deferments and volunteered for the US Army...

For a few of my friends their "summer of love" was in 'Nam. In '67-68 all of my friends came back in one piece.....physically.....not so together mentally (Mike Brown comes to mind).
Later, a couple of my friends came back in body bags.
A few of my friends went on Mormon missions to escape the draft (automatic 2 year deferment), one was run over by a tractor in a farm field in Iowa (oh the irony).

For the rest of us it was taking a quick break from university, making a few $$ at a summer job, being sure we went back to university in September to maintain our draft deferments (also to get an education).
Not a lot of stoned dancing in the park in SLC in '67
I caught up in '69 when after the Kent State massacre I started rebelling against The War and doing draft counseling.

Mouse, I had forgotten that! Back when it had codeine in it OTC!
And lots of pharmaceutical quality qualuudes floating around then, before the DEA started requiring the drug companies to keep records of where they were going, kind of like the do now with pseudofed.

Our family hiking trip that summer was from Holden (Lake Chelan) to Suiattle Pass (near Mt. Baker).
We caught a lot of rainbow trout at the first lake and fried them up in corn meal and butter for breakfast.
We visited Upper Lyman Lake and it had firm but slippery mud in the bottom, so it was fun to run and then slide along the mud on your feet.
Later my dad got the standard shots of Mt. Baker reflected in Image Lake.
Bonanza Peak was often visible; my dad and I got around to climbing that 20 years later with my fiance (now wife) and her dad.

Oh yeah, some memories come floating back. I remember visiting my brother who was in college and there were all these flowery art posters in a lot of the dorm rooms that were depicting a stylized number "69". I recall asking my brother what was all this "69" stuff? I don't recall ever getting an answer but a couple years later I do remember having an "aha" moment when I did learn what it meant. And of course I went "ewwww...I'll never do that...that's sick".

Living in Tempe, AZ at the time, my parents sent me to a Quaker camp for one week at near Shaver Lake, California. I rode over with Jaime, an older, college-aged Quaker who was actively working as a draft counselor to help people get any deferment possible, but the logical deferment for a Quaker was "conscientious objector." "C-O" I was born into Quakerism so I could make a plausible claim for C-O status if I played my cards right. Jaime coached me, indoctrinated me, counseled me, etc. the whole ride over to California and Shaver Lake (two days).

At camp I ran into other young Quakers from southern California. They created quite a conundrum for the older Quakers running the camp. The young Qs were ultra-liberal, pot smoking, acid dropping, sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll teenagers. The older Qs were conscientious, pacifist, and politically liberal BUT socially and economically conservative. The impasse between the generations was "resolved" by day three when the "worst" of the young partying Quakers were sent home early by the elders who asserted their authority and ended the chaos.

___

Later that summer I did have a "life changing" experience when my Mother - who decided her pacifist Quaker son nonetheless needed to be toughened up - sent me to a 26-day Colorado Outward Bound course. My instructor was John Evans (several Yosemite first ascents, plus Vincent Massif in Antarctica). John was inspiring, with the physique of a Greek God. COBS did the trick and I learned patience in the face of pain and suffering. I also got pleasure from physical activity and decided I liked outdoor stuff, climbing, etc.

I graduated from HS in Palo Alto in '67. We spent the summer driving up to San Fran, parking our car a few blocks from Haight/Ashbary so no one would know that we were weekend hippies. When we ran out of money, food, and smoke we'd head back down to the safety of mom and dad to resupply. Lots of nights at the Filmore laying on the floor watching the ceiling spin.